All-Knowing, All-Powerful, Ever Loving God

One thing I truly struggle with, as an atheist, as a person, as a friend to believers, is that huge gap between what REALLY IS and what believers have to do in order to continue making sense of reality through the eyes of their belief. They must redefine words and phrases again and again. They must find a way to hold "free will" and "God's will" together in one hand and figure out how those concepts can adequately explain things. Believers must repeat, like mantra, again and again "God is love."...or else reality would seep in and remind them that bad things happen to believers and non-believers alike. So do good things. There is NO correlation between "loving god" and violent acts against innocent children.

It's not just that I am still feeling raw and grieving after the massacre of twenty-something tiny school children and adults. It's not just that I am "so sensitive" to the pain of others.

It's ongoing. It is an awareness that I embrace, the clarity that comes from being an atheist.

There is no god who is going to deliver us from this earth. There is nothing to save us from the loss of our own lives. There is no one between what is "evil" and where we are. There is no one and nothing protecting us from the reality of our own smallness in this amazing and vast universe. And there is no one coming to save us from our humanity.

When a person is willing to go to any lengths to maintain their belief system in the face of a total dearth of evidence, proof, or clear action of any supernatural being, that person has chosen to stay from truth, light, life, love, and the absolute necessity of humans to do for themselves. I wish I could help my friends to see this. But I understand their disinclination to even consider letting go of the binds of the belief...

I expect that the universe is so disinterested in us, that it might not even desire to offer us disconfirmation for a belief without lots of work on our part. I expect that this helps to maintain nuttyness, even past the point where it could be obvious that we are dead wrong. The universe just keeps getting on, with us mostly in tow riding the roller coaster of effect. Sometimes we find some insight that dampens out the rough trip. Most times we are the bug, sometimes we get to understand.

It is unfortunate that religion is the one human endeavor where the standards for evidence and truth are in a permanent state of suspension . Such behavior in any other human endeavor would cost the offender an immediate price : loss of job , loss of respect , loss of prestige , financial loss . In religion , it is called " faith " , and we are " strongly encouraged " by the gullible to admire these superstitious maniacs .

There has been a few things that I have done that have verged on ritual, before I understood, what the hell I was doing. Sadly my 'relationship' with calculus is similar to this. My philosophy training seemed to interfer very badly with learning calculus, but I love statistics, go figure!